Factsheet #1
“Animal science” at our land-grant universities (LGUs) – courses, training, research, collusion, promotions, sales, and public relations for the meat, dairy, fish, and egg industries – does grave and far-reaching harm to human health and economies, nonhuman animals, and the natural world. As part of its mission to establish basic rights of all animals, bolster human rights, and eliminate rights of corporations, Responsible Policies for Animals (RPA) works to end “animal science” through the 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign, named for the approximate amount of time human beings have enslaved and destroyed nonhuman animals for food, status, career, and other purposes.
RPA has sent LGU executives in all 50 states and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities more than 350 letters, 200 factsheets, 50 books, 50 videos, and 50 bibliographies since 2003, about the injustice of “animal science” and the urgent need to end it. Simultaneously, RPA has given lectures, run websites, distributed brochures and fliers, published articles and letters, and advertised in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Academe, the Society of Environmental Journalists’ magazine, and elsewhere. Some LGUs ignore the problem; some try to defend the indefensible; none is yet making the needed change. Like other institutional injustice, the news industry suppresses the “animal science” travesty. As always, we the people must solve the problem.
University Indoctrination
Universities’ traditional mission is education as distinct from training, indoctrination, public relations, and other mental conditioning. Education means leading forth, from the Latin – a lifelong process where observation, study, self-examination, and reason overcome delusion. Education promotes morality – what is good for living beings – through academic study. “Academic” means having no direct application. The public legitimately expects universities to educate, not indoctrinate. But universities increasingly indoctrinate for industry – to everyone’s detriment.
First professions, then industries, brought universities into their service. Every profession and industry has an ideology, often confused with reality. Ideology is obvious in slogans like “better living through chemistry” or “Got milk?” The chemicals industry kills countless beings, including humans. So universities should teach chemistry academically — not for the industry. The meat, dairy, fish, and egg industries destroy countless humans and other beings, so universities should teach zoology academically, not “animal science” for the industries.
Our land-grant universities’ (LGUs’) mandate – to teach agriculture and the mechanic arts “in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” – rolled out the red carpet to industry training and indoctrination. Industries and corporations do not live and cannot have a conscience. Absent constant vigilance, universities enable industry to dominate society, undermining the Constitution, dooming human beings and the other animals.
Agriculture is cultivation of fields – there is no “animal agriculture.” The law establishing the U.S. Department of Agriculture invokes crops, soil, water, and seeds – not animals. The meat, dairy, fish, and egg industries exploit government and our LGUs at terrible cost to the living world. Government will not base policy on reality as long as universities deny reality.
Food Indoctrination
“Science” is knowledge. Industries benefit from public nescience – lack of knowledge – of anything that casts them in a negative light. Conditioned to link eating from animals to health, wellbeing, family, and the natural order, like everyone else, university instructors and executives predictably defend carnism – meat ideology – though science debunks it.
Responsible Policies for Animals’ (RPA’s) 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign, described above, does not blame “animal science” participants personally. The injustice of the meat, dairy, fish and egg industries is well known, but generations of Americans have grown up mistakenly believing there can be “humane” or “natural” meat, a “healthy” human diet with meat, dairy, fish, and eggs, and so forth. Universities should not reinforce such false beliefs.
“Animal Science” Indoctrination
Conditioning by family, school, news, and other institutions determines what human beings “choose” to eat. Universities perch atop the hierarchy of institutions guiding how humans think and live. At any moment, millions of people work or study at our 106 LGUs. They influence millions more. LGUs boast some of the world’s largest alumni associations. Graduates of LGUs work in every field, many in influential and esteemed positions.
“Animal science” at our LGUs – courses, training, research, collusion, promotion, sales, and public relations for the meat, dairy, fish, and egg industries – drives home to all in the LGU sphere, every minute of every day, false beliefs that flout current knowledge of human nature, nonhuman animals, and harmful impacts of the meat, dairy, fish, and egg industries. Campus slaughterhouses, animal sales, chicken, pig, cow, horse, turkey, duck, fish, goat, goose, sheep, rabbit and other confinement and breeding facilities proclaim to the world, Enslaving and eating from animals is good for humans, it is natural, it is right, and it comports with science.
Science negates those beliefs – so universities should not reinforce them with “animal science.” People take industry and corporate promotions with a grain of salt, but they trust universities and expect them to expose false beliefs – to educate, not enforce industry-generated delusion, not put careerism, fundraising, and public relations above morality and the search for the truth.
Scourge on Human Beings
LGU “animal science” is a grave injustice against human beings. In the 1930s, people began to link poor health to eating from animals. The industries responded with sophisticated public-relations campaigns foisting on generations of Americans false beliefs “animal science” bolsters today: that nonhuman animals exist for humans and cannot have rights; that human beings are natural omnivores who evolved as “hunter-gatherers”; that humans are “at the top of the food chain”; that human beings must eat from animals for adequate protein.
Human beings are natural herbivores who evolved as prey to large cats, dogs, snakes, and raptors. Enslaving other animals gave humans infectious diseases that kill people by the thousands or millions. Food poisoning, even from plants, mostly originates in animal use. Eating from animals overloads humans with protein and is a major factor in heart disease, stroke, diabetes, breast and colon cancer, and other widespread lethal non-communicable diseases. As the world’s preeminent nutrition scientist puts it, “There are virtually no nutrients in animal-based foods that are not better provided by plants.”
Informed of the “animal science” travesty for nearly a decade, our LGU executives are shirking their responsibility to yet another deceived generation by indoctrinating rather than educating.
Scourge on Nonhuman Animals
Imagining a safe life when predators were a constant danger, humans tens of thousands of years ago started killing predators who were not attacking. Humans drove some predator species extinct by killing them, others by taking their food through organized hunting. Humans’ assault on predators grew as humans began herding, then enslaving (“domesticating”) nonhumans. Accompanying today’s slaughter of about 50 billion land animals per year and countless billions of fish, the war on wolves, fish-eating birds, otters, cougars, seals, foxes, sharks, tigers, and others makes unsave even those supposedly “protected.”
Animals bred for food lead unfulfilling lives, most so miserable that some people who know their plight find the animals’ extremely short lives a consolation. Many die in agony. There is no overstating the injustice of “animal science.” Most people avoid the many books, videos, and websites showing the misery of animals beaten down and killed by the industries “animal science” supports and promotes.
Scourge on the Natural World
Killing predators to protect human property in the form of fish, chickens, sheep, and others severely disrupts the natural world. Many predators are keystone species – killing them erodes their ecosystems. Other impacts of the industries “animal science” supports: 51 percent of greenhouse gases heating Earth’s climate; toxic feces in groundwater, rivers, and topsoil; vast ocean dead zones from toxic chemicals used to grow animal feed; forests, wetlands, and grasslands destroyed for grazing and feed crops; ever larger deserts due to grazing. Any one of these would make “animal science” an unconscionable injustice, and the list is much longer.
What We Must Do
Inform friends and acquaintances. Urge LGU executives and trustees to eliminate “animal science.” Urge your governor to help – they are trustees of our LGUs, and “animal science” undermines their health, environment, and economic programs. Inform your state and U.S. legislators, food and education officials, newspersons, people in all walks of life. Support colleges and universities that do not have “animal science.”
All of the relevant facts support RPA’s 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign to end “animal science” and establish justice in education. No one at any LGU, government office, or anywhere else has refuted any of RPA’s claims in nearly a decade of educating and campaigning. Learn more from RPA literature and lectures, and by communicating with RPA.
Industry radically undermines the Constitution by dominating schools, universities, the news industry, the food system, and other institutions. Restoring the Constitution, amending it to establish justice, and getting America back on track will take longterm dedication. Do not stop “voting with your wallet,” but establishing justice requires us to fundamentally change our institutions.
Start today. Become an RPA member. Support and take part in the 10,000 Years Is Enough campaign.